Free Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks Page A

it is a process I cannot rush. Sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes it takes forever. Think of it as a percolation period, when you let your ideas brew and the flavor of your story build.
    Lots of ideas occur to me while this is going on. I don’t write them down. I don’t write anything down—except for names, which go on a name list I carry with me everywhere. But nothing else. It’s a firm rule. I used to think that if I got an idea, I should write it down immediately so that I wouldn’t lose it. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with brilliant ideas that I would dash down on slips of paper so they would be saved for when I awoke the next morning. What happened was that either I couldn’t make sense of them or they turned out to be not so brilliant after all. So I’ve changed my thinking on this. If an idea doesn’t stick with me for more than twenty-four hours, it probably wasn’t all that hot in the first place.
    Anyway, this thinking period—this dream time—is crucial to everything that happens later, but particularly to the construction of my outline. I want to be able to picture my story in images before I try to reduce it to mere words. I want to think about the possibilities. Everyone asks a writer where he gets his ideas. You’ve already seen the chapter on that. The truth is that coming up with ideas is easy; it’s making up the stories that grow out of them that’s hard.
    Sometimes I have to jump-start the process. Just sitting down and thinking about writing doesn’t always work. It would be nice if it did, but the creative process is more complicated than simply deciding to create and then doing it. Sometimes, my mind doesn’t like it when I try to put it to work, and it just shuts down. Sometimes, it chooses to think about other things. Instead of focusing on how I can solve that latest plot dilemma, it prefers to concentrate on how long it will be until I eat again or whether or not the sprinkler system will stick on for another twenty-four hours like it did yesterday. Trying to tell it what to do is like trying to teach your cat to sit up and beg. If it feels like it, it will. If it doesn’t, good luck.
    What I can do to banish that recalcitrant attitude is to put myself in an atmosphere that encourages dreaming. Some moods and settings and experiences are more conducive to creative thinking than others. For each of us, this varies. I find I am able to free up my thinking best in a couple of very specific ways.
    One is to take a long drive, preferably out in the country somewhere. Driving puts me in a zone that allows me to concentrate on the mechanics of driving the car while thinking of something else entirely. I find myself coming up with ideas I could never imagine if I just sat down and tried to conjure them. Maybe it’s the movement, but it works every time.
    A second freeing experience is to go to the symphony. I can sit there listening to the music and disappear into another world. I don’t know why, but classical music seems to suggest fresh places and new stories. It transports me. It causes me to imagine possibilities for writing that invariably yield something good. This result doesn’t come about with any other kind of music. When I was a kid, I used to do the same thing using stirring sound tracks from movies like
Ivanhoe
and
Plymouth Adventure
. Now, it’s classical music. I’d like to think my tastes have matured, but I’m afraid the truth is otherwise.
    In any case, listening to classical music and taking long drives are what work for me. You will have to find out what works for you. But something will. Something will help free up your creative thinking and allow you to start imagining the possibilities.
    But enough about you. Let’s get back to me. At some point, the mass of images floating around in my head reaches critical mass, and I have to get them out of there.